I figured the About Me page is pretty one-dimensional, after all, it’s only meant to showcase what I am in terms of the web and the rest I display elsewhere in tidbits.

As you can probably tell by my headers on each page I’m pretty into the natural world. I don’t think we should forget it with our ever increasing dependency and pervasion on/ of the Internet. Part of the reason I chose Dreamhost was because they’re carbon neutral and I think that’s an important step in today’s businesses, if you can, there’s no reason not to do something like that.

I’m also a huge fan of music, I guess chilled electronica is my game but I love so much more. Anything that has soul and talent. You can go to my Last.fm page, I guess that has the most detailed stuff on what I’ve been listening to better than I can try and say. I love going to concerts unfortunately I haven’t found any good places or people to see in Poole/ Bournemouth yet so if anyone has any suggestions based on my likings do get in touch!

I’ve just been reading some of Understanding Foucault (finally) and it seems pretty cool. Kind of what I was trying to get across last night – or at least that’s how I read it. Am glad I did Philosophy and Ethics for (almost) A level as quite a lot of those ideas come out in these figures.

A big part of me is my beautiful fiancée, Julia. We’ve done nearly together the past two and a bit years, Iceland, Cyprus, car journeys, living together, living apart and being in love. I can’t really express how much she means to me. I was reading an interview with Umberto Eco and he said everything comes down to lists. Lists are the sign of a more advanced society, more then just the descriptive, all the characteristics that try to make up that thing. I guess it’s a step towards trying to show the complexity of even the simpler things.

Maybe you’ve learnt a bit more about me, perhaps not. I haven’t done much better at understanding myself tbh =).

Maybe it’s because it’s 2AM, maybe it’s because I’ve just spent the last two hours listening to Autechre and Squarepusher or maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Web.Studies, more then likely is it’s a mix of all of them and more. But I’ve come to the temporary conclusion that there is nothing of us.

I’ll try to explain what I’m trying to think. From Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything to McKee and his Textual Analysis book and the more I read about post-structuralism. It’s just another theory that radically goes against the previous theory (structuralism and its ilk). Then someone in a century or more or less will say something else plausible and academic thought will shift that way.

It makes sense then, looking at it from afar and above, that there is no thought. No tangible way of being. I feel this should shock me but it’s like the Lemon Jelly song, Page One from ‘lemonjelly.ky’ (you can tell I like them, can’t you?)

Imagine if you can what it is like to have no possessions at all, nothing. Very few people are able to imagine such a thing, to have nothing at all. Well let us, you and I, try to imagine something a hundred times harder, not just to have nothing at all, but when there was nothing at all. The very beginning of time, the dawn of history, page one. Nothing at all. The earth itself without form, a void. Only an emptiness, formless, a dark endless waste of water. No living thing, no plant or tree no bird or animal. Nothing. This is before people; before anything at all. A void, sitting silent, still. And then.

Nothing.

Same applies for human thought, there’s no connecting factor with how we are or think. There’s progress and then nothing comes of it, or at least that’s how the song seems.

Well that’s it for the time being.

I believe the site’s took taken shape (thank you Julia) and is fully working. If anyone finds any usability bugs please do get in touch, though.

Things I have learnt in the last couple of weeks:

• Some basic PHP
• Some basic Javascript
• How nice (so far) Dreamhost are, even if they do keep trying to sell me a private server.
• The loveliness and forgiving nature of HTML 5
• How the best designs in Photoshop are the accidental ones
• That I actually find it easier to hand code than use Dreamweaver and go through its menus.
• The importance of typography
• The importance of accessibility
• How WordPress works and how to customise templates.

It’s been pretty fun designing this from the ground up and getting back to grips with it all. Everything validates at HTML  5 and CSS 3 apart from my  blog, but I’m working on that. It has two errors because of inline CSS when a gallery is implemented but I’m not sure how much I can influence that or if it’s just WordPress, anyone got any ideas?

I still have to make the kerning on the titles look more natural, they’re all set to a kern of -75 but because of the nature of the waves it makes some letters look much closer to each other so I’ll have the fun task of typing each letter into it’s own layer and aligning them tomorrow!

It seems that in designing this site I have overlooked one crucial aspect. Actually showcasing my work in a good way. The way it is now I could have a maximum of four projects before it started to look bad and I’d need a scrollable div. Not the end of the world I’m sure but there are better solutions out there and I want to find them. So that’s today’s task, make a cup of tea and think, design, implement. All from 12.40, I need to stop going to bed so late!

I can’t help it, I’m really not liking the site as it’s turning out so I’m going to propose some changes. Leave a comment if you agree/ disagree with any of my suggestions.

1. It looks unbelievably amateurish, probably because it is.
2. The silly bubble things don’t really make sense.
3. The header is ugly and hard to integrate into a good site design.
4. Meh.

On the plus side, apart from the nav element, it looks relatively consistent across ~50 browsers although I’ve had a few complaints about screen issues which hopefully will go away with the redesign anyway. So I’m going back to my visual diary and going to kinda start again. Here’s hoping.

Update at 8.50pm: I’ve had a change of heart, I’m going to give my design one more chance and build it from scratch (again) but this time with a couple of ideas I picked up from brainstorming a separate site. I’ll post the results up here after I’ve returned some films and bought some milk!

Hello there,

My site’s taking form nicely. I’ve decided to construct it in HTML 5, the reasons being 1. It shows I’m up with web trends, most modern browsers can render the basic tags I’m using. 2. I want to push both people and browsers to supporting the new standard rather than waiting for 2020 or whenever the W3C believes it’s going to become the de facto. Get in touch if you think that this is a good or bad move. So far all the pages validate apart from the main page because it uses Dreamweaver’s built-in script for the rollover image, I’m sure there are alternatives though so I’ll research that. Interestingly, (for me anyway) I’m still using Espresso as my main editor, I guess mainly because of the really easy FTP access it gives and Quick Upload on save. The fact that it’s so much nicer looking, quicker, and better organised than Dreamweaver, I just wish it had better lazy code writing like Adobe’s beast but it’s a small sacrifice to make tbh.

I’ve got a nice contact form that uses PHP and has basic JavaScript validation with the help of Kirupa and a few Google searches. It’s been quite fun building that portion and learning some PHP and how it works, same with JavaScript, I’ve never managed to get into it and understand it but the more I spend in it’s company the more it’s starting to make sense. Most of the pages now have content and are coming along nicely, a couple of images to spruce things up. Also there’s a custom error page that I’m rather fond of but definitely not the best out there.

I’m still not happy with the design; I can’t get it to look how I want it to be. The only cure is more hours on Photoshop but already I’m tiring of it =p.

The next things for me to do are: complete and upload my CV, build a site map,  build a WordPress theme to make this blog consistent with the site and get the design and colour schemes right.